oh, those wacky fringe liberals.

Yahoo news has carried a blog post from Ted Rall, and a more frothing liberal I'd be hard pressed to find. Ordinarily, I'd completely ignore writing like this, but this one is really too good to pass up.

Obama is so far to the left, he pushed the American public into a voting storm that caused one of the biggest party gains in the history of the country.

But he's not nearly liberal enough for the fringe who got him elected. This guy accuses Obama of being just as much, if not more right wing, than W. Bush.

As my gaming friends like to say, "lol whut?"

Here's some choice bits out of Ted Rall's post.

Six days into the Obama presidency, I'd seen enough.


"Give the man a chance?" I asked on January 26, 2009. "Not me. I've sized up him, his advisors and their plans, and already found them sorely wanting. It won't take long, as Obama's failures prove the foolishness of Americans' blind trust in him. Obama isn't our FDR. He's our Mikhail Gorbachev: likeable, intelligent, well-meaning, and ultimately doomed by his insistence on being reasonable during unreasonable times."

That last one is really telling. This guy thinks that Obama has been "reasonable" pushing through all of his socialistic agenda. And, what's more, he wanted Obama to be unreasonable.

Wow.

We may have changed. But Obama hasn't. It was obvious from the beginning that Mr. Hopey Changey was devoid of character, deploying a toxic blend of liberal rhetoric and right-wing realpolitik.

I think that speaks for itself really. Head on over there and read through the article if you want to take a peek into the mind of a far, far fringe liberal.

elitism doesn't work for politicians.

But President Obama and Vice President Biden didn't get that memo.

And still haven't.

By now, we should long be familiar with Obama's elitism (even though he's an empty Chicago suit) due to his openness about it. To wit:

They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

I won't get into this rant again, even if being called a racist, ignorant, uneducated, armed religious freak goes way over the top, even for a politician.

People out there are still hurting very badly, and they are still scared. And so part of the reason that our politics seems so rough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time, is because we're hard-wired not to always think clearly when we're scared.

And I won't get into this one again, even though being called a lizard-brained, scared peasant goes way over the top, even for a politician.

If people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren't serious in the first place.

I really enjoy this one. Oh yes, Fearless Leader, insult your base and see where that gets you. Even Joe Biden chimed in with his "stop whining" comment.

Now, in a 60 Minutes interview, Obama's made another winning comment. He says

[leadership is] a matter of persuading people. And giving them confidence and bringing them together. And setting a tone. And making an argument that people can understand.

What?

I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I just have to ask if I read that correctly.

Did I read that correctly?

Obama thinks that people have lost faith in him due to an inability to understand his arguments?

I do apologize, Dear Leader, for being an ignorant, undereducated, clinging-to-guns-and-religion country bumpkin (even though I live in a metropolitan area of California) who can't understand all those big words you string together in a vain attempt to educate me on your ideology. Please, dumb it down for me even more so that I can understand your grand design.

Get the hell out of our white house. Elitist socialistic liberal mindset plus Chicago windbag equals angry intelligent voters.

DON'T TREAD ON ME.

the horror of obamacare

Doctor Hal Scherz, a pediatric surgeon at Georgia Urology and Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, president and cofounder of Docs4PatientCare, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in which he quotes a letter that he and fellow doctors are showing in their waiting rooms. I reproduce a part of it here.

"Dear Patient: Section 1311 of the new health care legislation gives the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services and her appointees the power to establish care guidelines that your doctor must abide by or face penalties and fines. In making doctors answerable in the federal bureaucracy this bill effectively makes them government employees and means that you and your doctor are no longer in charge of your health care decisions. This new law politicizes medicine and in my opinion destroys the sanctity of the doctor-patient relationship that makes the American health care system the best in the world."

There is much more good stuff in the rest of the article- I highly recommend you read it!

Furthermore, I found another article on the Wall Street Journal whose headline reads "Employers Raise Workers' Share of Health Costs", and it made me remember a conversation I had with one of the district managers for the company I currently work for.

I had written this man an email about the shoddy health benefits that the company was offering to me, now that I've completed my 90 days evaluation period. In short, if I want medical coverage, I have to pay 6.5% to nearly 25% of my income. And that's ridiculous. After we talked it over a bit, he brought up Obamacare and the effect it will have on companies- I addressed that in a post here.

I haven't posted in awhile. But I was right.

One of the last things I said was that my hope for positive change with this administration died. That's still absolutely true.

But I've read and listened and learned a lot of things in the more than year and a half that I haven't been posting and if anything I'm even less hopeful.

Let me start with Obamacare for the Obamanation from the Obamination.

I was given a lesson in the realities of this "universal healthcare" system from one of the people at my company who has worked directly with the official information given to our company.

Here's how it works: any company that fails to provide healthcare for each of its employees will be fined $2,000 per employee, per year. Any company that provides healthcare for its employees will, firstly, pay for said healthcare. And then the government will tax the company about $2,000 per covered employee, per year.

Do the math: the Obama administration is making it more expensive for your employer to provide healthcare for you than not providing healthcare.

Why? ... We should all be asking that. Shouldn't companies that provide healthcare for their employees be spared the $2,000 fine? Of course they should, in a reasonable country. But this country's legislators are anything but reasonable. So to find out why, let's examine what the consequences will be.

Let's pick an imaginary company that currently provides healthcare for its employees, ABC Industries. Medical costs are rising, and typical companies share the cost in some fashion with the employees by taking a portion of the expense out of the employees' checks. ABC Industries is one of those companies, though the company is a little on the less-generous side and pays a smaller portion of the medical costs than the employee does. When Obamacare goes into effect, ABC Industries' cost per employee will rise by $2,000 annually.
ABC Industries' board of executives gets together in a meeting and looks at the numbers- their cost for supplying healthcare for their employees will now be the cost of healthcare plus $2,000. One of the executives interjects into the discussion that the fine for not providing coverage is only $2,000. There's a moment of silence as that sinks in, and then they start to discuss the possibility of simply soaking up the "fine" while they save money from not needing to provide healthcare.

The decision gets made- from a business' bottom line standpoint, not providing healthcare is the cheaper and therefore smarter way to go. The employees are provided six months notice that their company provided health coverage is coming to an end, and behind this letter comes the informative packet to help them all sign up for Obamacare.

Oh... so that must be the reason why Obamacare's impact on employers is structured like it is- companies are being prodded to put their employees on the government healthcare system. When you get right down to it, its a government incentive- "we'll give you a break on costs if you turn your employees over to our care".

The government wants more people on the governmental system? I shouldn't be surprised. It seems to be a pretty continuous idea. Jerry Brown, one of the candidates for governor of California and a California politician for a number of years now, had a radio show in the 1990's. A direct quote from one of his shows: "We need more welfare and less jobs."

So that's the kind of government we're getting- socialistic. Just like I said in December 2008, when I lost motivation to continue preaching about this.

Welcome to the Socialist States of Amerika, Comrade!

Here it comes.

This is the beginning of the end of American freedom.

This post is really aimed at the masses of people who voted for Obama, but I don't mind if everyone else who has a head on their shoulders listens in.

Have you ever wondered why America is the economic powerhouse of the world? Why American consumers are the ones who drive the world's economy? (And by extension, when our economy suffers, the whole world's economy suffers?)

Because we let our people keep the money they make. America has one of the lowest income taxes in the world- and according to the Tax Foundation, 32% of Americans don't even pay an income tax- they likely pay it, of course, but get it all back when they file their tax forms.



Think about it. When people get to keep more of their money, they get to spend more of their money how they want to. And we do. Let's face it, American consumerism drives our economy, and it's the exact reason why our economy is so powerful worldwide. It's why people from all over the world want to come to America to start their own businesses, to live the American dream- because the rest of the world taxes their people and businesses up to 70%. Imagine how hard it would be to live on your $20,000 a year income if you were only able to keep $6,000 of it. (The above income figure is not meant as an insult; at the moment, I'm making less than you.)

Obama has been quoted as wanting to "redistribute the wealth". He wants to take money from the people who have lots of it, and put it into governmental programs for the poor of America. The problem with redistributing wealth, ie, giving money and programs to poor people, is that it locks them into dependency on those programs- and they make no effort to better themselves, because, lets face it, they don't have to. They're getting taken care of and paid to be poor.

African American economist Thomas Sowell stated in 2004, "The black family, which had survived centuries of slavery and discrimination, began rapidly disintegrating in the liberal welfare state that subsidized unwed pregnancy and changed welfare from an emergency rescue to a way of life."

America spends more than one trillion dollars every year on total benefits to the poorest one-fifth of America. To quote Right Truth:

"To put a trillion dollars in perspective, it’s more than twice our total spending on national defense.

It’s larger than the total revenue collected by the federal individual income tax.

It’s about ten times as much as we spent on redistributive policies in the 1950s (in inflation-adjusted dollars).

It’s equal to the total before-tax cash income of middle-income households. That’s right, we transfer to the low-income population an amount equal to the entire income of middle-income households, that is, households in the middle fifth (40th to 60th percentile) of the American income distribution.

If a trillion dollars were simply given to those counted as poor by the federal government (37 million in 2005), it would amount to $27,000 per person. That’s $81,000 for a family of three, higher than the median income of all American families, and far greater than the poverty threshold of $15,577."

Here's another eye-opener. When rich people have money to spend, they spend it in order to make more money. Translation: They conduct business, which means they open new businesses, create jobs, create wealth, drive the economy, make things better for everyone. And, conversely, when we try to take money away from rich people, they find ways to hold onto it, to hide it. And that also means they're not using it to create more wealth... which means they're not out there conducting business and creating jobs.

To put it all together: America leads the world economy because we're not Socialists. We don't tax our people up to 70% like the Socialists in Europe. And don't come crying to me when your income tax shoots up, and you watch it pay for a whole host of new programs for the poor in America, and our economy suffers due to high-end companies leaving America to other places in the world where they're not taxed as much- leaving little but minimum-wage service sector jobs in America.

Dirty spiral.

I hope the Democrats who'll be in control of the Senate, and, possibly, the House, aren't nearly as left-leaning as our President-elect. I hope they'll have the intelligence to know where that Socialistic road will take them.

But, as for me, my hope for a positive change has died.